BookBlast Interview with Julian Evans, translator
Julian Evans, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I spent half my childhood in eastern Australia, on the edge of the Coral Sea, where I went to a school whose motto was “Every pupil a good swimmer.” That sub-tropical beginning, living barefoot, catching lizards, going to the beach every week, meant that when my parents brought me back to foggy, suburban south London, to an undreamt-of land of rain, shoes, and no lizards, I was instantly on the lookout for another somewhere to run away to. Luckily, I was sent to France at the age of thirteen on a school exchange, and that was it. I found languages easy to learn – French and German first – and I followed that relaxed path through school and three years at Cambridge, but as Søren Kierkegaard says, life is understood backwards but has to be lived forwards, so while I was successfully getting out of England as often as I could, I began to understand that easy didn’t necessarily mean the same thing as satisfying. So I tried other things: I wrote (in secret), I pestered a publisher for a job, I interested myself in what was being written in France and Germany. When I became a publisher’s editor and bought the rights to a French novel by Michel Déon called Un Déjeuner de soleil, I awarded myself my first translating job. Later, when I started writing more determinedly (i.e., wanting to get published), I realized what a really useful starting-off point translating had been. Looking back much later, I see that I’ve been incredibly lucky: languages seem to have taken me everywhere I’ve wanted to go.
When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
The first novels I remember reading were the historical novels, not much read now, of Geoffrey Trease, for their combination of intense adventure and serious historical background. More indelible than Trease’s novels, though, are Kipling’s Just So Stories, which as an infant in Brisbane I listened to the actor David Davies reading in his wonderful, wise, velvet voice. The Butterfly That Stamped seems to me still to be one of the richest and most unforgettable stories ever written. A few years on, it was Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath which alerted me to the idea that there were modern worlds of risk and adventure, among many other worlds modern and not so, by Marryat, Williamson, Jeffries, Melville, Poe – I was an insatiable and indiscriminate reader and remember walking to and from the library often, sometimes twice a week, to “change my library books.” And then one day I happened to pick up Hunger by Knut Hamsun and I had my first literary role model, the intellectual vagrant with a self-destructive but romantic streak. I have refined my self-image a bit since then. However rugged the literary racket can be, I feel scandalously privileged to be a part of it.
Why do you translate?
It came about almost accidentally, but I felt the value and the pleasure of doing it almost immediately. Alexander Pushkin called translators “the post horses of literature.” I not only like the idea of delivering other writers’ worlds across borders into mine but the feeling of gradually peeling away that inscrutable layer of another language and working to reveal a book’s moods, intentions, narrative, and language – the author’s love for their characters and the way they first make them come alive, then release them to be themselves. It’s an evolving activity that always offers new questions, puzzles, decisions; it’s also perfect exercise for a writer who isn’t, at that precise moment, writing.
How did you kick-start your career as a translator, what was your strategy?
I’ve mentioned this above. My professional beginning in the book world was as a publisher’s reader, reading the unsolicited manuscripts at a publisher called Hamish Hamilton, two days a week for £100 a month. Publishers don’t employ anyone to do that these days, though I found two prizewinning novels that way. From there I became the most junior of junior editors, but my boss, the great publisher Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, would let me go to Paris every Easter to talk to French publishers, and that was how, at Gallimard, I found my first translation: I bought the rights to Michel Déon’s novel and appointed myself its translator.
How and why is the role of the translator important as a UK editor engages in the acquisitions process? And how important is funding?
Frank Wynne has summed this up extremely well. Translators are often the champions of a book or a writer long before it, or they, can be appreciated by an editor. Translators can be the scouts, the hunters, the advocates, before they become the arrangers, surgeons, adapters of a text.
Funding is a perennial challenge. I’ve always been disappointed by the way many publishers cost their activity, on a book-by-book basis. If they believe in that activity, and in the continuum of literature, in being publishers rather than industrialists, then why can’t the overhead of translating a certain number of books per year be spread across their output, like electricity or distribution costs?
What are you most proud of translating?
To plagiarise myself, I feel outrageously privileged to have had the chance to translate the books I have translated. Some of the results have pleased me, but that’s usually because in the unspoken repartee between the writer – “Hey! I’ve just come up with this really memorable joke/mood/description” – and their translator, I can sometimes feel that I’ve given as good as I’ve got.
What is your biggest disappointment?
I don’t have one, in the realm of translating. All literary work, even in its final printed and published form, is a work in progress, not finished, only put aside. I’m sure I could improve on every translation I’ve done.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve just finished translating Michel Déon’s haunting short memoir-novel, Your Father’s Room (Gallic), and I’m now rereading our correspondence, which comprises, to my amazement, about 900 letters. Michel died last December; we wrote to each other for more than thirty-five years, and he was an indefatigable and unfailingly mischievous correspondent. I’m thinking about a book based around the letters. Given email’s supremacy today, perhaps it’ll be a story of the last epistolary friendship.
Your bedside reading?
The Ropewalker by Jaan Kross, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, The House With the Stained Glass Window by Żanna Słoniowska, The Innocent of Falkland Road by Carlo Gébler, Mes Arches de Noë by Michel Déon.
Your favourite prose author?
On a desert island? F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Your heroes in real life?
“Unhappy is the land that needs heroes,” as Bertolt Brecht said. Oh wait… In the current circumstances Barack Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama would all be useful.
Who are the five people, living or dead, you’d invite to a party?
John F. Kennedy, George Orwell, Graham Greene and Yvonne Cloetta and Angela Merkel.
Your chief fault?
Permanent unwarranted optimism.
Your chief characteristic?
A tendency to over-commit.
Your motto?
“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.” – Albert Camus, A Happy Death.
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